Google: your regular web pages influence your mobile rankings

In a video on YouTube, Google’s John Mueller said that the desktop version of your web pages will influence the position of your web pages in Google’s mobile search results. A user was afraid that hidden content in the mobile version of his web pages had a negative influence on the rankings:

“We are looking at the desktop version. That’s the canonical version so if you have the connection between the two pages, if they’re separate pages and we’d be looking at the desktop version and that someone would be using for indexing.

So if it’s visible on the desktop version and you’re kind of holding it away, simplifying it on the mobile version, then that’s absolutely fine.

If we run across situations where we see that people are abusing this that they’re kind of […] showing cartoons on the desktop side and showing adult content on the mobile site then that is something where we might have to reconsider that and see what we are doing there.”

What does this mean in detail?

There are two important things:

It’s okay to hide content on the mobile version of your web pages. Actually, it is often necessary to hide some parts of a page to improve the usability of the mobile pages.

For example, some content might be hidden until the visitor of the mobile page clicks on a ‘more’ button, a panel or another navigational element on the page.

The desktop version of your pages influences the rankings of your mobile pages.

According to John Mueller, Google will use the desktop version of your web pages to calculate the rankings. If your desktop pages are relevant, this will also have a positive effect on the rankings of your mobile pages.

New Year’s resolution: get better Google rankings

Better rankings for the right keywords lead to more website visitors, more customers, and more sales. Do the following to improve the rankings of your web pages:

Monitor social networks for mentions of your company and products. React to positive and negative comments about your business.

Improving the rankings of your web pages can have an extremely positive impact on your business. Fortunately, the tools in SEOprofiler make it as easy as possible to improve your pages. If you haven’t done it yet, create your SEOprofiler account now: